A SENIOR Conservative former Cabinet minister has warned against any moves to introduce elected peers into the House of Lords.

Port Talbot-born Lord Howe says that given the manifest and mounting reluctance by electors to affirm the legitimacy of the electoral process, it had become much easier to understand why the Commons was so hesitant, when the crunch came, to fashion the Lords in its own image.

Lord Howe, who was Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's government, questioned what would happen next to the Lords after all the changes that had taken place since Labour swept to power in 1997.

It was possible then for sensible people to regard the Lords as an archaic anomaly with no practical role and even less claim to legitimacy, he said in article for The Spectator magazine - one because a clear majority were there because of an accident of birth and two, one party, the Conservatives dominated the house. Plus the Lords seldom found the confidence to challenge the Commons on any important issue.

Lord Howe said that all that had now changed. Ninety per cent of the hereditary peers were removed in 1999, and the disappearance of the rest was widely regarded as only a matter of time. He said the Conservative majority had gone for ever and that neither of the two major parties now had more than one third of Lords membership.

On that basis, he said, much more quickly than might have been expected, a remarkable consensus had developed about the future political composition of the House of Lords. He said that all three parties had agreed explicitly that in the words of the present government's 2001 White Paper "The House should not be dominated by the government of the day or any political party."

So decisions of the House now very largely depended upon the votes of Liberal Democrat, "crossbench" and other independent peers, who between them accounted for no fewer than two fifths of the present membership.

Lord Howe said the change in composition since 1997 had greatly increased the practical day-to-day confidence of the Lords and the voting record spoke for itself.

In the five sessions between 1997 and 2001 there were 1,640 divisions in the Commons without a single government defeat. In the same period in the Lords, there were 639 whipped votes, of which the government lost no fewer than 164 (25%).

Lord Howe said that this certainly didn't look like the wholly appointed House of Cronies that Mr Blair was said to have wished for, sometimes even to have achieved.

On the contrary, he said, a large majority of the present Lords were there before he arrived in Downing Street. Many were men and women of notable distinction, experience or expertise - of a diversity unparalleled in any other legislature in the world.

Lord Howe added than on each of the occasions when the government has been defeated in the Lords, the Commons and thus the government had been obliged to reconsider and often to withdraw or amend, over hasty or misguided propositions.